A later skin of white brick
On the east slope of Xiakou Mountain, the One Hundred and Eight Pagodas stand above the west bank of the Yellow River gorge at Qingtongxia, a county-level city in Wuzhong. Twelve stepped platforms carry the towers inside the Qingtongxia Yellow River Grand Canyon, a national 5A scenic area. From the river the stack reads as a white triangle on the west bank, bright against the slope. Ming gazetteers already called the towers ancient, and already set them where the Yellow River runs between two mountains. The group sits about twenty kilometres southwest of Qingtongxia town.
The white is a later skin. From the bank the surface is whitewashed brick. Ming and Qing brick casings, and the repair of 1987–1988, including metal finials, were laid over stupas that had collapsed into mud. Before that work the slope was a line of eroded mounds. The climb today is the repaired group. A pagoda-forest temple stands south of the stupas, and a museum stands to the north. The towers are remembered here as a Tibetan Buddhist memorial beside the river.
Odd rows, and one hollow crown
The repair of 1987–1988 set the stupas from the bottom of the slope upward in rows of 19, 17, 15, 13, 11, 9, 7, 5, 5, 3, 3, and 1. Each row is an odd number. Counted through, the rows come to 108, and the odd numbers gather into a triangle on the west bank. They are lama-style stupas. The repair left four body shapes: overturned bowl, gourd, bell, and bent belly. Bases are cruciform or octagonal. Only the top stupa is hollow, and its opening faces east. The other 107 are solid.
One hundred and eight is also a Buddhist count. One explanation is 108 afflictions. Another adds 36 stars and 72 stars. Another adds the months, the solar terms, and the pentads. These are ways of counting inside the religion, number lore that travels with the towers, not a year of construction. Stories told on the slope include a dragon that had to be pinned under the hill, and Mu Guiying, the woman general of the old war tales, mustering troops here. Those are legends of the place.
Yuan on the register, Western Xia in the repair
On 13 January 1988 the State Council published the third batch of national priority protected sites. The national register lists this group as 一百零八塔, period Yuan, at Qingtongxia in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Repair work later exposed Western Xia and Mongol Yuan remains, and those who carried out the repair read the cluster as beginning in the Western Xia and flourishing in the Mongol Yuan. Canyon tradition also starts the towers in the Western Xia. Yuan on the 1988 register; Western Xia start and Mongol-Yuan flourishing in the repair reading—still no single construction year.
In 1962 painted silk was found in two small stupas on the river flat and sent to the Palace Museum. That find belongs to the flat, not to a painting left on the hillside. Below the platforms, the same gorge also holds the dam that ended Ningxia’s dam-less canal intakes.